Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026: Kagan and Soai

WHAT HAPPENED The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on 7 October 2026 that the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes jointly to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai, a French and a Japanese chemist, for their discoveries about how reactions that favour one mirror-image form can behave in unexpected, self-reinforcing ways. WHAT THE WORK IS A lot of molecules, including the amino acids in our bodies, can be built in a left-handed or a right-handed version, yet nature uses just one of them. Kagan and Soai found chemical effects that show how a small preference for one hand can appear and then grow. Kagan's work on non-linear effects showed that a small change in the make-up of a chiral catalyst can change the handedness of the product by much more than expected. Soai showed asymmetric autocatalysis, where a product helps make more of itself in the same handedness, so a tiny starting imbalance gets amplified. EXAM ANGLE - Chirality means a molecule and its mirror image cannot be superimposed (like left and right hands); the two forms are called enantiomers. - Asymmetric synthesis makes one enantiomer in preference to the other, which matters in medicines because the two forms can act differently in the body. - Keywords to remember: asymmetric synthesis, non-linear effects, autocatalysis, chirality. Published on 7 Oct 2026. Source: Nobel Prize website (nobelprize.org) announcement.